Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I don't do HTML sanitization. I escape everything except [A-Za-z0-9,. ].

Attempts to sanitize HTML (or SQL...) by eliminating a set of "dangerous" inputs inevitably end up as whack-a-mole processes as people keep discovering new evil things to throw at you. The only secure solution is to escape everything except a small set of "safe" inputs -- this is analogous to the situation with packet filtering firewalls, where "default deny all" is widely accepted as the right way to do things.



Escaping is important for all text fields, and I never use user text to build SQL strings without using some kind of typed parameter API.

But I'd like to let the user submit formatted HTML via something like FCKEditor and have it checked against a limited whitelist.

I don't trust my own knowledge of browser-specific HTML rules to do this on my own. It's got to be a common enough scenario, right?


Whitelisting.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: